Essays

Essays

Jun 26th 2014

I didn't know who Gerry Goffin was when I was in junior high school, and high school, in the '60s. I listened to AM radio constantly on my new transistor radio, and I knew all the songs on KEWB's weekly Top 20 - so well that sometimes I even called in and won Name It and Claim It.

Jun 23rd 2014

In Iraq, we are witnessing yet again the tremendous harm caused by religious fanaticism.

Jun 23rd 2014

I'd been writing novels and literary nonfiction for twenty years before I dared to write a 

Jun 14th 2014

The reconciliation of science and religion is one of the most compelling tasks confronting religious believers today. For we are truly faced with a pair of hostile, warring camps.

Jun 12th 2014

In 1923, T.S. Eliot wrote that in Ulysses, James Joyce had "arrived at a very singular and perhaps unique literary distinction: the distinction of having, not in a negative but a very positive sense, no style at all. I mean that every sentence Mr.

Jun 4th 2014

MELBOURNE – In New York last month, Christie’s sold $745 million worth of postwar and contemporary art, the highest total that it has ever reached in a single auction.

Jun 1st 2014

The Isla Vista mass murder was a preventable tragedy. It was the destruction of innocent life without need or reason. It is proof, as if more proof were needed, that we are past the time to break the nexus between guns, murder, and mental illness.

May 25th 2014

History is the story of the struggle of the psychologically normal majority of humanity to free ourselves from the tyranny of a psychologically disordered minority who are marked by their innate propensity for violence and greed.

May 22nd 2014

Part I – Watershed Moments

May 20th 2014

While we all rightly celebrate the protections afforded free speech by the First Amendment and are thankful, as President Obama said recently at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner, "We really are lucky to live in a country where reporters get to give a head of state a hard time on a da

May 20th 2014

Born in 1899, Lucio Fontana was an artistic child of the early 20th century: after being classically trained as a sculptor in his father's studio, he experimented with the major movements of his youth, including Cubism, Futurism, and Surrealism, as he became a painter.

May 16th 2014

Who said these words? “You just don’t invade another country on a phony pretext in order to assert your interests.”

May 13th 2014

The time is ripe for Christians to make a major refocus and become serious about the kingdom of God on earth, which Jesus set out to establish and which was the reason for his arrest, trial and execution by Roman officials.

May 8th 2014

I had the flu when I reread To the Lighthouse, more than 30 years after my first reading, and I was struck in the haze of fever by my frailty in the face of illness and aging and by Virginia Woolf’s poetic vision of life and death and what it all means.

May 4th 2014

John Nava, one of America's pre-eminent realist artists, is the subject of a small show of twelve portraits -- paintings, monotypes and Jacquard tapestries -- now on view at the Vita Art Center in Ventura.

May 1st 2014

“Ukraine – his Ukraine – was dead, a corpse. No, it was worse. It was gone. It had disappeared, vanished. It had been extinguished and obliterated by the Russians.

Apr 26th 2014
In the New York Times Book Review, Adam Kirsch laments a lost love -- the poetry of T.S. Eliot.
Apr 21st 2014

The sensible Joe Nocera is concerned: Apple has lost its creative mojo.

Apr 19th 2014

Christina Baker Kline is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Trainand four other novels: 

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